Presentation by Prof. Justin McCarthy at the Seminar on Turkish-Armenian Relations organized by the Democratic Principles Association on March 15, 2001
Presentation by Prof. Justin McCarthy at the Seminar on Turkish-Armenian Relations organized by the Democratic Principles Association on March 15, 2001 Throughout recent debate on the Armenian Question one statement has characterized those who object to politicians' attempts to write history. "Let the Historians Decide." Few of us have stated what we mean by that statement. It is time to do so. There is a vast difference between history written to defend one-sided nationalist convictions and what history should be. History intends to find the truth about the past. Historians recognize that the truth is illusive. They know they have prejudices that affect their judgement. They know that they never have all the facts. Yet they always try to find the truth, whatever that truth may be. Nationalists who use history have a different set of goals. They use events from the past as weapons in their nations' battles. They have a purpose the triumph of their cause and will use anything to succeed in their goal. While a historian tries to collect all relevant facts and put them in a coherent picture, the nationalist selects those pieces of history that fit his purpose, ignoring the others. Like other men and women, historians have political goals and ideologies, but a true historian acknowledges his errors when the facts do support his belief. The nationalist apolopist never does so. If the facts not fit his theories, the nationalist ignores those facts and looks for other ways to make his case. True historians can make intellectual mistakes. Nationalist apologists commit intellectual crimes. The Armenian Question has long been plagued with nationalist studies. This has led to an inconsistent history that ignores the time-tested principles of historical research. Yet when the history of the Turks and Armenians is approached with the normal tools of history, a logical and consistent account results. "Let the historians decide" is a call for historical study like any other historical study, one that looks at all the facts, studies all the opinions, applies historical principles, and comes to logical conclusions. Historians first ask the most basic question, "Was there an Armenia?" Was there a region within the Ottoman Empire where Armenians were a compact majority that might rightfully demand its own state? To find the answer, historians look to government statistics for population figures, especially to archival statistics, because governments seldom deliberately lie to themselves. They want to know their populations so they can understand them, watch them, conscript them, and most important to a government, tax them. The Ottomans were no different than any other government in this. Like other governments, they made mistakes, particularly undercounts of women and children. These undercounts can be corrected through the use of statistical methods. What results is the most accurate possible picture of the number of the Ottoman Armenians." By the beginning of World War I, Armenians made up only 17% of the area they claimed as "Ottoman Armenia." In fact, if all the Armenians in the world had come to Eastern Anatolia, they still would not have been a majority there. Two inferences can be drawn from the relatively small number of Armenians in the Ottoman East: The first is that by themselves, the Armenians of Anatolia would have been no great threat to the Ottoman State. Armenian rebels might have disrupted civil order, but there were too few of them to endanger Ottoman authority. Armenian rebels needed help from outside forces, help that could only be provided by the Russians. The second inference is that Armenian nationalists could have created a state that was truly theirs only if they first evicted the Muslims who lived there.
To understand the history of the development of Muslim-Armenian antagonism one must apply historical principles. In applying those principles, one can see that the history of the Armenians was a history like other histories. Some of that history was naturally unique, because of its environment, but much of it was strikingly similar to what was seen in other places and times. The principles: 1. Most ethnic conflicts develop over a long period. Germans and Poles, Finns and Russians, Hindus and Muslims in the Indian sub-continent, Irish and English, Europeans and Native Americans in North America-all these ethnic conflicts unfolded over generations, often over centuries. 2. Until very modem times, most mass mortality of ethnic groups and peoples was the result of warfare in which there were at least two warring sides. 3. When conflict erupted between nationalist revolutionaries and states it was the revolutionaries who began the confrontations. Internal peace was in the interest of settled states. Looked at charitably, states often wished tranquillity for the benefits it gave their citizens. With less charity, it can be seen that peace made it easier to collect taxes and use armies to fight foreign enemies, not internal foes. World history demonstrates this too well for examples from other regions to be needed here. In the Ottoman Empire, the examples of rebellions in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria demonstrate the truth of the principle. On these principles, the history of the Turks and The Armenians was no different than other histories. Historical principles applied. The conflict between the Turks and Armenians did indeed develop over a long time. The primary imputes for what was to become the Armenian-Muslim conflict lay in Russian imperial expansion. In the time of Ivan The Terrible, the sixteenth century, Russians began a policy of expelling Muslims from lands they conquered. Over the next three hundred years, Muslim peoples, many of them Turks, were killed or driven from what today is the Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. From the 1770s to the 1850s Russian attacks and Russian laws forced more than 400,000 Crimean Tatars to flee their land. In Caucasus Region, 1.2 million Circassians and Abhazians were either expelled or killed by the Russians. Of that number, one-third died-one of many mass murders of Muslims that most often has been ignored. The Tatars, Circassians, and Abhazians came to the Ottoman Empire. Their presence taught the Ottoman Muslims what they could expect from Russian conquest. Members of the Armenian minority in the Caucasus Region began to rebel against Muslim rule and to ally themselves with Russian invaders in the 1790s. Armenian armed units joined the Russians. Armenian spies delivered plans to the Russians. In these wars, Muslims were massacred and forced into exile. Armenians in turn migrated into areas previously held by Muslims, such as Karabag. This was the beginning of the division of the peoples of the Southern Caucasus and then Eastern Anatolia into two conflicting sides-the Russian Empire and the Armenians on one side, the Muslim population and the Ottoman Empire on the other. Most Armenians and Muslims undoubtedly wanted nothing to do with this conflict, but events were to force them to take sides. The 1827 to 1829 wars between the Russians and the Persians and the Russians and Ottomans saw the beginning of a great population exchange in the East that was to last until 1920. When the Russians conquered the Erivan Khanete, today the Armenian Republic, the majority of its population of its population was Muslim. Approximately two-thirds, 60,000 of these Muslims were forced out of Erivan by the Russians. The Russians went on to invade Anatolia, where large numbers of Armenians took up the Russian cause. At war's end, when the Russians left Eastern Anatolia, 50-90,000 Armenians joined them. They took up the places of the exiled Muslims in Erivan and elsewhere, joined by 40,000 Armenians from Iran.
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